By Steve Jones, USA TODAY
His sweat-drenched, testosterone-fueled jams fired the imagination of generations of musicians that followed him, including such icons as George Clinton, Michael Jackson, David Bowie, Prince and The Who, and helped fuel rap's popularity.
"He was not only the Godfather of Soul but the Godfather of Funk and Rap," hip-hop star Ice Cube told allhiphop.com. "Music will never be the same."
Brown, a charter member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, died Christmas morning of heart failure after a brief hospital stay to treat pneumonia. He had suffered a number of health problems in recent years, including prostate cancer and diabetes.
BET Networks Chairman and CEO Debra Lee said: "We have lost the most inspirational force the music world has ever known. James Brown's impact across all genres of music — especially funk, soul, disco and rock — is immeasurable and will never be duplicated."
Brown's career spanned more than five decades, and he had well over 100 hit singles.
His vocals were fiery declarations embellished by screams and squeals, grunts and "good gawds." His songs were punctuated by horns that irresistibly drew people to the dance floor, where the wicked grooves from the guitars and drums commanded people to move. He once told USA TODAY, in a rare interview at his home in Beech Island, S.C.: "My music wasn't written by Mozart, Beethoven, Bach or Schubert. It's written by God and me. They go 'a one and a two and up.' We start on the downbeat. Bam! And that's where we got them."
More than music
Brown was the ultimate showman and a frenetic dancer. Crowds at his concerts anticipated his pirouettes, splits and other antics as much as they did the songs themselves. His signature move near the end of his show was to be helped from the stage, seemingly exhausted, only to throw off his cape and race back to the microphone for more.
But Brown was about more than just music.
The self-proclaimed "Hardest-Working Man in Show Business" also was a powerful political voice in the black community. He had the ear of the common man, but also knew presidents and kings.
Brown ran his own multimedia empire that included TV and radio stations and an extensive stable of acts. He was active in the civil rights movement in the '60s and '70s, helping to fan the Black Power movement with powerful anthems such as Say It Loud — I'm Black and I'm Proud.
He helped quell the riots that followed the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., making a live broadcast on his radio stations on the night of King's shooting asking his audience to avoid a violent response.
The next day, in Boston, he was asked by Mayor Kevin White to televise a concert performance to keep people at home.
At the same time he was writing soul-power anthems, he performed for troops in Vietnam, and he later raised eyebrows in the black community by supporting President Richard Nixon's re-election campaign in 1972.
Roots in rhythm and blues
Born in Barnwell, S.C., in 1933, he served a reform-school sentence for breaking into cars before his musical career began. He then teamed with singer Bobby Byrd's Ever Ready Gospel Singers, which soon evolved into the R&B group The Flames (later the Famous Flames) in 1953. They were signed to King Records in 1956 and scored an immediate rhythm-and-blues hit with the pleading Please, Please, Please.
Further R&B hits and constant tours on the R&B concert circuit followed, and gradually he made inroads into the pop market with such hits as 1962's Night Train and a tormented cover of the pop ballad Prisoner of Love in 1963.
That year also saw the release of Live at the Apollo, one of the first massively successful live albums in any musical genre and a landmark recording that captured the inimitable intensity and legendary stop-on-a-dime musical precision of a James Brown show.
Building on that success, in 1964 he released Out of Sight, a new sort of R&B hit based on rhythmic grooves rather than traditional pop song structures. It was a crossover hit, and he refined the style further with hits such as Papa's Got a Brand New Bag, I Got You (I Feel Good) and Cold Sweat, stripping his sound down to its essential propulsive elements and paving the way for the funk and disco sounds that would define the '70s and much of the '80s.
He maintained his "Minister of New New Super Heavy Funk" status through the first half of the '70s, creating funk classics the likes of Mother Popcorn, Super Bad, Get Up (I Feel Like Being Like a Sex Machine), the prophetic Brother Rapp, and Get on the Good Foot.
But acts such as Parliament and Funkadelic (which included former Brown band members such as Bootsy Collins and Fred Wesley) took over R&B's center stage, and Brown's supple grooves didn't fit the more metronomic disco style.
His last major hit was 1985's Living in America, from the movie Rocky IV (a film with which Brown, a former boxer and a lifetime self-motivated striver, certainly could identify).
Hard-working to the end
His later life proved problematic. Tax problems had dismantled much of his business empire, and a PCP-related 1988 police chase brought him tabloid notoriety and a six-year prison sentence, commuted to 15 months plus 10 months in a work-release program.
His third wife, Adrienne, brought domestic violence charges against him; in 1996, she died after complications from a cosmetic surgery procedure. Brown was arrested in 2004 on domestic-violence charges filed by his fourth wife, Tomi Rae; they subsequently reconciled and the charges were dropped. He had his seventh child, James Joseph Brown II, with her in 2001; the couple later separated amicably.
Through it all, he continued to record (his last new album was 2002's The Next Step) and perform — he was planning a show Dec. 31 at B.B. King's Blues Club and Grill in New York.
"He was dramatic to the end — dying on Christmas Day," said Jesse Jackson, a longtime friend. "He'll be all over the news all over the world today. He would have it no other way."
One of Brown's many Christmas songs was titled Let's Make Christmas Mean Something This Year.
This year, it means American culture has lost a true giant.
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